South-East Asia Japan Cable (SJC) now in operation

The 8,900km South-East Asia Japan Cable (SJC) system, connecting Singapore with Japan, is now operational, according to a press release posted on Japanese telco KDDI (au)’s website. The USD400 million cable, supplied by US-based broadband communication solutions provider TE SubCom in partnership with Japan’s NEC Corporation, provides connectivity to seven countries – Japan, China, the Philippines, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Brunei and Singapore – to meet the growing bandwidth requirements in the region and to allow for cost effective and resilient connectivity to other submarine cable systems, including the Japanese link to trans-Pacific fibre that runs to the US. The SJC system can be further extended to 9,700km, with plans to also land in Songkhla, Thailand. The SJC cable consists of six fibre pairs (64×40Gbps DWDM), with an initial design capacity of over 15Tbps, upgradable to 23Tbps, and utilises the state-of-the-art advanced 40G SLTE and Optical add-drop multiplexer (OADM) Branching technologies.